Overview:

Join a team working at the center of frontier AI. You’ll collaborate directly with researchers in one of the world’s premier research labs, transforming breakthrough ideas into real, reliable, scalable capabilities used across Microsoft products. This role sits at the high‑impact intersection of research ↔ engineering ↔ product, where the work you do directly shapes what AI becomes next.

Focus Areas You May Work On

• Agentic Memory

• Efficiency

• Security

• Frontier model architectures

• Mathematics and logic applied to LLMs

You might be a great fit if you:

• Motivated by the intersection where research meets engineering — the space where new ideas become real systems.

• Engaged effectively with ambiguous, open-ended problems where exploration and clarity are equally important.

• Motivated by performance, safety, correctness, and experience, not just cleverness.

• Communicate clearly, collaborate naturally, and debug anything with calm and rigor.

• Inspired to build systems that meaningfully advance what AI can do, not just iterate on what already exists.

We operate with urgency and ambition:

• Short iteration cycles: hypothesis → prototype → evaluate → refine → ship

• Deep collaboration with researchers inventing new capabilities

• High ownership of systems, experiments, and outcomes

• Evidence-driven decisions informed by evals, metrics, and safety signals

• A builder’s mindset: clarity, craft, and care for the details that make systems robust

You’ll join a team motivated by curiosity, accountability, and the conviction that we are building something that truly moves the field forward, tackling problems that don’t even have names yet alongside people defining the state of the art. If this motivates you, we want to meet you. Bring your curiosity. Bring your craft. Bring your appetite for building the future.

Microsoft Research is committed to cultivating a workplace that reflects the diversity of the global communities we serve. We actively seek to build an inclusive and equitable research environment where individuals of all backgrounds feel valued, supported, and empowered to contribute. We encourage applications from candidates who bring a broad range of experiences and perspectives. Our team works collectively to ensure that Microsoft Research remains a respectful, collaborative, and high-impact space for all researchers.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we are dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world

Responsibilities:

• Translate research into systems: take early concepts and turn them into robust prototypes and product-ready components.

• Design high velocity experimentation loops: datasets, evals, benchmarks, agent flows, safety tests, and decision frameworks.

• Scale and optimize: training, inference, efficiency, latency, cost, reliability.

• Partner cross functionally: coinvent with researchers, codesign with product teams, and land features that matter.

• As a Research Software Development Engineer in Microsoft Research, you will design, develop, execute, and implement technology research projects in collaboration with other team members, research partners, and product groups.

• Work with the team to identify, evaluate, and deploy new AI tools and technologies to accelerate our progress.

• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to competently operate across an entire modern AI-centric software stack.

• Adaptability to dive into a new domain quickly. Polyglot technology curiosity. Be a voracious learner of new languages, paradigms, tools, and techniques, consuming publications.

• 1+ year(s) experience building agentic coding systems that operate at cloud scale using common agent protocols and coding frameworks.

• Systematic use of benchmarking and other data-driven techniques to guide design and development.

• Ability to thrive in the face of ambiguity, able to prototype starting with a research concept or paper rather than a spec. Be a thought partner and operate as part of a multidisciplinary team as we build prototypes quickly, fail fast, pivot, and adapt.

• Experience with data science, machine learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision, multimodal input and processing, and software security.

Software Engineering IC2 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $84,200 - $165,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $109,000 - $180,400 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.